The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) pledged at its recent Mexico City meeting to establish an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT). This team of 24 experts is responsible for developing and proposing protections for trademark holders. Such protections are needed...

Tragedy of the anti-commons occurs when property rules fail to enable efficient social coordination. In radio spectrum, rights issued to airwave users have traditionally been severely truncated, leaving gains from trade unexploited. The social losses that Ronald Coase (1959) asserted, appealing...

The Internet has devalued content to the point where it is often offered at no charge — newspapers, for instance — or widely misappropriated, as with music and movies. Either way, many people expect much of their content to be free. Why is this, how did it happen, and, focusing on music and...

The advent of telegraphy shifted news gathering from the public postal system to a private network dominated by telegraph companies and wire services, a nearly simultaneous revolution in journalism's technology and political economy. Postal news gathering had been open to all newspapers with few...

More intensive copyright enforcement reduces piracy, raises prices, and lowers consumer surplus. We show that these results do not hold regarding the extent rather than intensity of enforcement. When enforcement is targeted at high-value buyers such as corporate and government users, the...

Since the beginning of the year 2009 the German press publishers have lobbied for their own neighbouring right which should cover even short snippets of online press articles. The new right should basically protect the press publishers' investments in the online environment. Currently there is...

This interdisciplinary paper by a mathematician and a legal counsel, both from the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, discusses the potential impacts of the so-called “initial coin offerings”, and of several developments based on distributed ledger technology (“DLT”), on corporate...

The World Wide Web (“WWW”) is a dominant force in the lives of many. It provides access to a range of services and information from email access to shopping to social media to instant information on search engines like Google. For most persons using the WWW, this is all that there is to the...

The American corporate graveyard is littered with prior darlings of Wall Street and pillars of the New York Stock Exchange, such as Kodak and Polaroid (both photography pioneers). More recently, other businesses and entire industries that were once household names have similarly experienced...

In a short period of time virtual currencies have gained significant traction and become an economic reality, with Bitcoin being the most dominant among over 500 virtual currencies. Bitcoin and other virtual currencies present a particularly difficult and unique jurisdictional challenge to...